Modeling Impacts of Policing Initiatives on Drug and Criminal Careers of Arrestees in New York City, New York, 1999 (ICPSR 3604)

Principal Investigator(s):Johnson, Bruce D., National Development and Research Institute; Golub, Andrew, National Development and Research Institute

Summary:

This study sought to understand the accuracy and validity
of arrestee self-reports of drug use and the overall contact of
arrestees with the criminal justice system, with a secondary focus on
how arrestee self-reports of drug use correspond to urinalysis
results. Moreover, this study investigated whether arrestees were
aware of the New York City Police Department's Quality-of-Life (QOL)
policing efforts and whether they had changed their criminal behavior
as a result. A QOL Policing ... (more info)

This study sought to understand the accuracy and validity
of arrestee self-reports of drug use and the overall contact of
arrestees with the criminal justice system, with a secondary focus on
how arrestee self-reports of drug use correspond to urinalysis
results. Moreover, this study investigated whether arrestees were
aware of the New York City Police Department's Quality-of-Life (QOL)
policing efforts and whether they had changed their criminal behavior
as a result. A QOL Policing Supplement, designed to explore new means
of evaluating police behavior, was administered to all adult arrestees
in the five boroughs of New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan,
Staten Island, and Queens) who had completed an Arrestee Drug Abuse
Monitoring (ADAM) program interview, provided a urine specimen, and
were willing to answer additional questions concerning QOL policing.
Part 1, Policing Study Data, is a large integrated dataset containing
all of the variables derived from the 1999 ADAM interviews, the
Policing Supplement instrument, and administrative records data from
the Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) and the New York State Division of
Criminal Justice Services. This dataset is linked, via an anonymous
case number, to Part 2, Arrestee Criminal History Data, which contains
each arrestee's official criminal history.

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Study Description

Citation

Johnson, Bruce D., and Andrew Golub. Modeling Impacts of Policing Initiatives on Drug and Criminal Careers of Arrestees in New York City, New York, 1999. ICPSR03604-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2003. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03604.v1

(1) Users are strongly encouraged to obtain copies of
the "Methodology Guide for ADAM" and the "Analytic Guide for ADAM"
from the ADAM Web site:
http://www.adam-nij.net/index.asp. (2) The user guide, codebook,
and data collection instruments are provided by ICPSR as Portable
Document Format (PDF) files. The PDF file format was developed by
Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader
software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to
obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web
site.

Methodology

Study Purpose:
A fundamental and continuing problem in sociology
and criminology is assessing the validity and accuracy of a
respondent's self-reports on various phenomena of interest. Generally,
criminological research has used data either from self-report surveys
or from official records, but rarely from both sources. Many studies
present information based entirely upon official criminal history
data, but have no self-report information from offenders. Other
studies rely solely on self-report data, ignoring the official
record. Research has shown that it is possible that an arrest event
might lead to an inaccurate self-report. During the 1990s, the New
York City Police Department (NYPD) introduced numerous innovations
intensifying its efforts to reduce crime and restore order. One
central aspect of that change, quality-of-life (QOL) policing,
emphasized the control of minor misbehaviors that were highly visible,
such as fare-beating, aggressive panhandling, graffiti writing, and
sleeping on public benches. In the past, these minor offenses would
have been mostly ignored. QOL policing was designed to send a message
to offenders that various disorderly behaviors would not be tolerated.
In the mid-1990s, the NYPD targeted these QOL behaviors for arrest.
The primary focus of this study was to understand the accuracy and
validity of arrestee self-reports of drug use and the overall contact
of arrestees with the criminal justice system, with a secondary focus
on how arrestee self-reports of drug use correspond to urinalysis
results. Moreover, this study sought to investigate whether arrestees
were aware of NYPD's QOL policing efforts and whether they had changed
their criminal behavior as a result.

Study Design:
The data for this research came out of the New
York City Policing Study (hereafter the Policing Study), a research
project designed to explore new means of evaluating police behavior.
The Policing Study used the relatively novel technique of interviewing
arrested individuals in order to obtain insights about policing and
its potential effect on the arrestees' illegal activities. The
Policing Study was also intended, in part, to document the value of
self-report information provided by adult arrestees about their drug
use, offending patterns, contacts with the criminal justice system,
and the impacts of the QOL policing initiatives upon their routine
criminal activities. The Policing Study was a supplement to the
research platform provided by the National Institute of Justice's
Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program (see ARRESTEE DRUG ABUSE
MONITORING (ADAM) PROGRAM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1999 [ICPSR 2994]).
Since 1987, the ADAM program (formerly the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF)
program, see DRUG USE FORECASTING IN 24 CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES,
1987-1997 [ICPSR 9477]) has obtained, on a quarterly basis, drug
histories and urine samples from arrestees on a voluntary basis at
Manhattan's central booking facility. Starting in July 1998, ADAM was
expanded to include samples of arrestees from all five boroughs of New
York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Queens).
Data from the ADAM program provide powerful indicators of the
prevalence of various illicit drugs among arrestees and of drug use
trends over time. ADAM is the only major ongoing survey of drug use
that employs an empirical validity check, namely urine tests, to
corroborate self-reported drug use. Several interviewers from the ADAM
program were used to recruit subjects and administer both the ADAM
protocol and the Policing Supplement instrument. Interviewers followed
ADAM procedures for selecting respondents and administered the ADAM
instrument in use during 1999. Immediately afterwards, interviewers
gave arrestees an informed consent form for participation in the
Policing Study. If the arrestee agreed, the interview was conducted
immediately. During the informed consent process, subjects were asked
for written permission to have the interviewer record their arrest
number, arrest date and time, and other personal identifying
information. Subjects were informed that the project would obtain
their criminal histories from New York City and state agencies that
retain such information. Respondents were promised $15 after release
for completing the questionnaire. First, ADAM and Policing Supplement
data files were matched and merged using the ADAM bar codes, creating
a combined Policing-ADAM dataset. Next, arrest-related and other
identifying data were used to obtain defendant and court processing
information from the New York Criminal Justice Agency (CJA), and
official criminal record information from the New York State Division
of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). Prior arrests outside of New York
State, in the federal system, or before age 16 were not obtained.
Before obtaining the data, information transfer agreements governing
access to and use of the information were negotiated with both
agencies. New York State law permits transfers of official criminal
histories, including sealed cases, to professional researchers for
legitimate research purposes. Researchers obtained both sealed and
unsealed criminal events by collaborating with DCJS to create an
anonymous research dataset. The end result of all data collection
efforts was two datasets. The first was a large integrated dataset
containing all of the variables derived from the ADAM program
(including urinalysis results), the Policing Supplement instrument,
and dispositional information from CJA (Part 1, Policing Study
Data). This dataset was then linked, via an anonymous case number, to
a second dataset containing each arrestee's official criminal history
(Part 2, Arrestee Criminal History Data). For Part 1, several QOL
questions regarding cigarettes and truancy were excluded from analysis
because there were too few Policing Study respondents under the age of
18. For Part 2, the criminal histories are provided as several
records, with each record representing an arrest, a sentence, or
related information for a given individual. For each subject, research
staff aggregated the data across event records to create counts and
develop various measures of criminal history contacts.

Sample:
The Policing supplement was intended to be administered
during the third and fourth quarters of 1999 to all adult arrestees in
the five boroughs (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and
Queens) of New York City who had completed an ADAM interview and
provided a urine specimen, and were willing to answer additional
questions concerning QOL policing. However, the preliminary sample
yielded only 470 respondents. An additional 36 arrestees were
interviewed in the second quarter of 1999 during the project's pilot
stage and were added to the final database. To increase the sample
size further, the project performed supplemental data collection in
the week after the end of the official ADAM data collection in the
Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, generating another 386 interviewees.
The complete sample includes 892 adult arrestees. To facilitate
comparisons across gender, the ADAM program purposefully oversampled
females. For this study, simple weights were employed in Part 1
(WEIGHT) so that females would constitute 15 percent of the weighted
sample. See ARRESTEE DRUG ABUSE MONITORING (ADAM) PROGRAM IN THE
UNITED STATES, 1999 [ICPSR 2994] for additional information on the
sampling frame used to collect the ADAM data.

Data Source:

The Policing Study Supplement, a self-administered
survey, was given to arrestees in the sample who had completed an ADAM
interview, provided a urine specimen, and were willing to answer
additional questions concerning QOL policing. Dispositional
information and criminal histories were collected from official
records kept by the New York Criminal Justice Agency and the New York
State Division of Criminal Justice Services. The ADAM instrument was
used to collect data from voluntary, anonymous, and confidential
self-administered interviews with male and female adult arrestees and
the results from urine specimens provided by these arrestees within 48
hours of the time of arrest, which were used to detect the presence of
several drugs. Information regarding the ADAM subject's age,
race/ethnicity, birth year, and the crime for which the subject was
arrested were obtained from official police arrest records.

Response Rates:
Approximately 96 percent of ADAM subjects who
were approached agreed to participate in and completed the Policing
Supplement.

Presence of Common Scales:
None.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:2003-06-05

Version History:

2006-03-30 File UG3604.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.

2006-03-30 File CQ3604.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.